Seagate Showcases Solid-State Hybrid Drives for Desktops and Laptops.

Seagate Technology, one of the world’s largest maker of hard drives, demonstrated a number of innovative hardware at the Consumer Electronics Show. Among the highlights are solid-state hybrid drives for desktops and laptops as well as 5mm hard drive for ultra-thin notebooks.

For the first time, Seagate showcases its latest laptop solid-state hybrid drives (SSHD) and an all-new desktop SSHD. Now in their third-generation, the Seagate SSHD solutions integrate solid-state memory and massive hard drive capacity to substantially boost performance of storage sub-system, according to the manufacturer. The result is higher-performance and greater capacity at a highly affordable price. Ideal for road warriors, power users and gamers, these new drives are projected to be the ultimate for those demanding performance, capacity and value.

According to Seagate, adding NAND flash cache of proper capacity to enterprise hard disk drives increases the number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) they can perform by two or three times, which is impressive, but still dramatically lower when compared to even mainstream solid-state drives.

The incredibly slim 5mm-thin 2.5” hard disk drive (HDD) designed exclusively for ultrabooks and thin client devices is also demonstrated in operation. Packing 500GB of capacity this drive is thin enough for today’s thin and light ultrabooks and even tablets to deliver greater design flexibility and value for consumers, who do not want, or cannot afford solid-state drives.

Hard drives for cost-efficient ultrabooks are projected to become available in volume sometimes in the second half of the year.

Discussion

5400RPM for your 3rd gen Hybrid drives don't make sense. It is opposite to your policy of desktop drives, where you no longer make 5400/5900RPM desktop drive but just 7200RPM drives. This was because you think 5400RPM drives waste time and don't save that much power and you are exactly right.
Why not make the same policy for laptop drives? Power consumption isn't an issue. A 5400RPM vs 7200RPM drive takes less than 1 watt more on average. I know hybrid drives are a bit different but they still benefit from fast mechanicals since it's only 8GB of flash and doesn't cache writes.